When comparing Homebrew vs Hammerspoon, the Slant community recommends Homebrew for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?”Homebrew is ranked 2nd while Hammerspoon is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose Homebrew is:

Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.

Pros

Pro

Quick access to a large repository of open source software

Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.

Pro

Easy to setup and use

Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.

Pro

Less maintenance than Macports

Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.

Pro

Open Source

Pro

Homebrew tries very hard to use existing tools and libraries

Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.

Pro

Does not require using sudo

One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.

Pro

Unintrusive

Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.

Pro

Builds quickly and requires few dependencies

Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.

Pro

Deeply customizable

Hammerspoon's Lua scripting and broad API allows you to perform any action you can imagine on your mac. It hooks into many OS APIs directly and has some high-level APIs to manipulate things like Spotify or iTunes. See the full list here.

Pro

Automate actions based on the operating system

Hammerspoon lets you hook into OS level events and trigger any action you can imagine. From setting up a simple keyboard shortcut to launching a complex workflow using multiple apps and scripts.

Cons

Con

May cause issues when trying to create symlinks or installing in places where SIP has changed permissions

One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on. (Alternatively, you could install Homebrew somewhere other than /usr/local, but that might break various packages that depend on having stuff in and relative to /usr/local/.)

Con

Command line tools for XCode required

Once xcode is installed you can install Homebrew, including new(er)/different versions of most of the build stuff that xcode-select installed, like a newer gcc, newer git, etc.

Con

Relies on outdated system libs

Con

Some knowledge of programming required

Hammerspoon is scripted in the Lua programming language, and some familiarity with programming in general will be needed to use it. Some plugins exist that can be used by adding some files to a specific folder, but this will not give the flexibility that is so key to Hammerspoon

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